More jobs have now been created than lost since President Barack Obama took office, preliminary revisions to the U.S. payroll count showed.
The number of jobs created in the year ended in March was revised upward by 386,000, the Labor Department said in Washington yesterday. If that estimate is confirmed in the final report, it would wipe out the 261,000 employment deficit spanning January 2009 to last month that is currently on the books and mean the U.S. has created a net 125,000 jobs since Obama was inaugurated.
At the same time, the 8.1 percent unemployment rate in August was higher than the 7.8 percent when Obama took the oath of office. Joblessness has exceeded 8 percent for 43 consecutive months, the longest stretch in monthly records dating to back 1948.
“The jobs recovery over the last 2.5 years has been a bit stronger than initially reported, although much work remains to be done to return to full employment,” Alan Krueger, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement.
The figures won’t become official until the final update is issued with the January employment data released in February 2013, three months after the presidential election.
Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s campaign responded to the revisions by turning the focus back on the jobless rate, saying the president has fallen short of his own economic advisers’ 2009 estimates of how much unemployment would decline…
Read more: Bloomberg Businessweek
